


you were a place i had come to know

by Jagged



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Character Study, Diaspora, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-08 08:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21472693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jagged/pseuds/Jagged
Summary: In Duscur they used to say: every riverbed was a mountain once. Inside of Dedue there is a grief like a river stone washed clean and smooth. Once he would not have had patience; once he would have been on his feet already, set to follow.The way things change. And how some yet remain the same. The strays, the greenhouse, the moon from any window.In the four chambers of his heart the same face, the same name.Dedue, on grief, choices and coming home.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Dedue Molinaro
Comments: 20
Kudos: 143





	you were a place i had come to know

**Author's Note:**

> Extra warning for description of injuries and death, as well as some mentions of canon-typical racism.

In spite of everything strays still gather in Garreg Mach. Ivy crawls between the cracks in the walls. Between the ramparts, the fallen towers, the slow trickle of beasts, soldiers, civilians that comes to take refuge behind the old fortifications, wildflowers constellate the grounds. 

Though clearly efforts have been made to rebuild and return it to its former glory, Dedue finds the back of the greenhouse unkempt and overgrown; under a tangle of northern vines a cat has made her nest, baring needle teeth and a stern hiss when he disturbs the soft clutter of her young.

She relents after he sits, makes himself still save for his breathing. It is evening. Faintly he can hear the rush of the wind outside, a distant whinnying of horses. Though she keeps her eye on him, the cat allows the boldest among her progeny to clamber upon his lap. The warmth of their little bodies seeps through his pants as they tumble, trip then collapse, exhausted and content.

He does not know when exactly he himself starts to doze. Only that the moonlight is drifting through the battered windows when he opens his eyes next, and the door is creaking on rusty hinges, and someone beyond it is already walking away.

Crouched over a piece of jerky, the mother cat stares at him. His back aches. What injuries he earned from the battle at Myrrdin are still tender, new skin raw and bruised deep over the wounds. 

Dedue thinks: the guards’ patrol route does not lead all the way into the greenhouse. No one has any reason to be here, not at this time. And even if he did not know these things — the past five years have made him an even lighter sleeper than he’d been before. 

He thinks: a stranger would have woken him. A friend would have nudged him towards a proper bed.

A kitten stretches and yawns in his lap, then curls back up, head tucked under his palm. The moonlight drifts across the tiles. It was a night like this when Dedue gave his life. Luminous, so quiet you could almost hear the world turning. Dimitri’s hand in his for what he’d thought would be the last time.

When Dedue shifts, he finds his scarf has been pulled up while he was asleep, draped tighter around his shoulders than he would have it himself. The soft fabric rubs against his cheek, and he closes his eyes, inhales. The battle left it smelling of smoke, dust and iron. 

Nearly half a decade he spent looking, before he found Dimitri bloody and unwell and wild.

In Duscur they used to say: every riverbed was a mountain once. Inside of Dedue there is a grief like a river stone washed clean and smooth. Once he would not have had patience; once he would have been on his feet already, set to follow.

The way things change. And how some yet remain the same. The strays, the greenhouse, the moon from any window. 

In the four chambers of his heart the same face, the same name.

Morning slowly drags itself from behind the monastery walls, and he thinks he must have dozed off again. The kittens blink tiny eyes at him as they flounder between flower pots. 

“I will come back,” he tells them, the way he would have liked to tell Dimitri these five years ago. 

The mother cat nips, solemn, at the pad of his fingers, and lets him go.

  
*

  
“You’re late.”

Dedue inclines his head, unable and unwilling to argue the fact. Not that it matters: Felix’s already turned his head back towards the nave, a bird dog’s pinpoint focus carved into every inch of him. They are not so different in this, though Dedue is sure Felix would bristle at the comparison.

Beyond them, standing in the light, rubble at his feet, Dimitri stands. His head is tipped back, his good eye closed. Hands in fists at his side. Lips moving as though in prayer. Dedue catalogues: the dents in his armor, the bags under his eyes, the specks of dried blood that cling to the underside of his jaw, the thick fur lining of his coat.

A mumbling. Dimitri’s eye flick to the side and then he flinches, suddenly. Dedue feels Felix’s hand at his elbow before he even realizes he has moved forward. He’s about to tell Felix to let go, but Felix is faster, his mouth twisting in a sneer, all of him still aimed Dimitri’s way despite the strength of his grip holding Dedue back.

“Don’t bother. It’s pointless when he’s like this. He won’t even notice you’re there.” Felix’s fingers tighten momentarily, near-painful in their intensity, but then he drops his hand, shakes his head. He looks awful, threadbare and angry and brittle.

_I know better than anyone how His Highness becomes when his ghosts crowd him out of his own body_, sits on the tip of Dedue’s tongue. _Me who held him when he came back after crushing that rebellion, terrified of himself, repeating to himself whatever poisoned words you threw at his face; do not presume that you are the expert now._

_Which of us was with him, after Duscur? Who held him through the shaking and the howling, who bandaged over his wounds when he tried to appease the dead with what little he had left? _

_Do you truly mean to translate him to me? You_ dare?

But it is not Dedue’s habit to ask unnecessary questions, and so he holds his tongue on this subject. Turns fully to Felix instead.

“How long have you been here?” 

Felix shrugs. There is a slump to his shoulders that he would never have allowed in the Academy days. “He was there when I came up a little after sunrise. He’s always here in the mornings, like there’s nothing better to do than stare at ruins and talk to the dead.” A snort. “Some king.”

“And yet here you are with him.”

“Where else?” Felix asks, and Dedue supposes he is glad that this at least has not changed.

“The infirmary, perhaps? You were injured during the battle.”

Immediately Felix crosses his arms. The movement draws more attention to the stiffness of his posture than not. “It was nothing.” 

“You should go to Mercedes before she sets Annette on you,” Dedue says, mild though privately amused by the slight nervous pinch to Felix’s mouth at the prospect. This hasn’t changed either. He had wondered how easily — or not — they would fall back into the comfortable, well-worn dynamics of their academy days. A single year, against the five that have passed since: it should not have counted for so much. 

But it did. But it does. 

“You’ll stay?” Felix asks finally, guarded, as though he also is testing the changes in the landscape of the Blue Lions, the way Dedue will slot himself back in.

“I will keep watch over him,” Dedue agrees, and Felix stares at him for a while longer before he jerks his head in assent.

“Guess it’ll be good to have someone else to watch his back in battle,” which Dedue generously decides to translate to thank you, and then Felix retreats, slowly, only turning his back to them when to do otherwise would cross from caution or concern into comedy.

His heels echo on the smooth stone, until he is gone. It is early still. They are alone.

“Your Highness,” Dedue says, finally stepping to Dimitri’s side, and then trails off.

Even with the light streaming down on them he is not entirely sure how to read Dimitri’s features. Cannot meet that lone eye or read his face. Remembers, his heart heavy, the shock in his voice when he’d met them upon the bridge, how despite the genuine emotion he’d shown immediately after he’d turned away and left when they returned to the monastery, disappearing too quickly for Dedue to follow. 

If he had followed, then or last night, as his heart wanted him to — a mistake he’d made before, when they were both younger, Dimitri in one of the bad phases — 

Dimitri does not like to be chased. It is difficult for him to differentiate between sounds and faces. But now he is still, now he is waiting, in a place of his choosing. It is as safe as Dimitri gets when so haunted.

Still silent, he turns. His gauntlet creaks as he extends his hand, but then he stops himself and Dedue recognizes this, the fear of reaching out, of breaking. 

Something rattles in his chest. He raises his own hand, and Dimitri lets him take his, allows him to wind their fingers together, leather and plate against Dedue’s new scars, his old callouses. When he turns his head the sun cuts across his cheek, his closed eye, paints him gaunt and pale and wild. 

“You’re real,” Dimitri says at last. His voice is hoarse, and very small. “You came back.”

Dedue breathes through the sudden bloom of feeling in his throat.

“I am here,” he tells Dimitri, and raises his other hand to Dimitri’s shoulder, his face, the back of his neck, reverent and careful; trembles, when Dimitri leans forward to rest their foreheads one against the other, and feels their breaths syncing together.

“You never haunted me,” Dimitri confesses in a whisper, and the loneliness in it is such that it’s a wonder he does not shatter.

  
*

  
Of course Dedue has ghosts of his own. The surprise that comes to him in those five years that make After is that there are others who carry them as well. Of course he knew of survivors, the ones that fought still and called for revenge, that he himself helped put down.

And yet, after years trapped at court, never leaving Faerghus until the Academy, it is not until After, bloody and beaten and despite all odds alive, that he realizes: he is not alone. There are communities. There are networks, and families, the ones that had left for the Empire or the Alliance, for trade or for love or the simple want to wander the world. There are children, underfoot and laughing. There are elders. They are scattered and cautious and alive and they remember the things he thought he would never get to share again. 

It has become custom, he learns, to hold vigil every year and remember, and the feeling in his breast is a beast made half-gratitude and half-grief. He lingers on the edges of ceremonies as a stray dog lingers along the shadows of a campfire: unsure of his welcome, desperate to belong. As a child he was never pious; he mumbled through his prayers and on holy days he would plant the incense sticks with no particular reverence: one at each door, three for the altars, for the gods of land and air and home. 

That he even remembers the words to the prayers is maybe the biggest surprise of all. Sometimes as he limps past the courtyards and playgrounds he will hear fragments of children’s songs and find himself humming along. It is the bewildering feeling of stepping outside after a storm to find, amid the wreckage, a bird’s nest, a spiderweb, a flower intact and bright with dew.

“To restore Duscur… it is a worthy goal,” the grandmother says, when he speaks to her of the future. Everyone calls her this: grandmother. She never offers a different name, and Dedue never pries. Her voice gentles on her next words. “But it is not yours alone to bear.”

“Whose, if not mine?”

He inhales, turns his face away. It is so rare that his temper slips through the calm he has been so careful in constructing throughout the years; though he attempts to rein it in now, it kicks and snarls like a trapped animal. 

“I have the ear of the king,” he says, careful to keep his snarl behind his teeth. “Tell me of any among us who would have a better chance of it.”

“You wish for the Kingdom to give back what it took.”

He’s sat with the others enough that he can hear what she doesn’t say. Restitution, yes. But what of retribution? It would be a lie to say he has not asked himself the selfsame question. A lie also, to pretend he has a satisfactory answer. Some days it was a struggle to keep quiet, to remember his place: at Dimitri’s shoulder, at the periphery. That boy from Duscur, dead but for His Highness’ whim. Being sixteen, eighteen, angry and powerless and grieving, wishing for nothing more than for the Kingdom to burn as Duscur did.

He thinks of Mercedes in the cathedral. The softness of her eyes. _You’re still here_, said like it was something she was glad about. Asking about his gods while the light falling from the cathedral’s stained glass windows spun around their feet; listening to him speak. One little sentence, at the beginning of their friendship, like a pebble, a seed, a reminder.

But also: eyes on him, when Flayn disappeared. The whispers, the suspicion. Dimitri bristling when he caught sight of it, always too late. Nothing can be taken back and words aren’t like birds, to be caught after they’ve been given wing. 

And yet again: Ashe with him in the kitchens. His smile easy, his cheeks red when Dedue had leaned in to remove a speckle of flour from his face. _Lonato was good with plants_, he told Dedue once. Dirt on their knees. _My mother as well_, Dedue had offered in exchange. Neither of them nobles, with lineages or duties to consider as the others did: only the simple grief of it, the empty spaces, the loss. 

The war’s redrawing of geographies has not left a single one of them untouched. Mercedes is more often in the infirmary now than in the cathedral, though he still finds her there sometimes, looking up at the scaffolds shoring the hole in the roof, the gem at her neck glinting in the morning light. The shape of her grief: black woods, a dark horseman.

“Have you ever thought of going back?” he asked her once. “To the Empire. To the place where you grew up.” 

“Oh, no,” she said. Her hand smoothed her skirt over her knee. “There isn’t anything for me there anymore. With Emile — all my family is gone now, you know. My place is in Fhirdiad, or here with everyone.”

“Do you think they will come back?” he asks the grandmother now as they sit by the fire. They have often spent evenings like this, most of all during the long uphill struggle that had been his healing after his taking Dimitri’s place in his cell, his subsequent escape. For a long time it had been difficult to even walk, so he’d sat by the hearth, warmth suffusing through scar tissue and slow-mending bones as he relearned the cadence of Duscur speech.

She does not answer him right away. The water in the pot above the fire trembles with heat. 

“There are children ten years old now who do not recall a time when Duscur stood by her own,” she says finally. “Many of those who fled have made new lives for themselves. They have families, friends. They have put down new roots.”

She pours him tea in a worn clay cup. Its colors are faded, but the patterns discernible still, achingly familiar. 

“As you have. And you would leave them to return to Duscur still.”

“I could not imagine doing otherwise.” He swallows around the stone in his throat, his earlier anger forged into something brittle as glass. “I want to go home.”

Her hand is wrinkled, the skin tight over her veins, her bones, the warmth that still lingers there despite it all. 

“We will,” she tells him. “You do not have to do this alone.”

  
*

  
Dedue catches Byleth as they pour over their maps, a little before they march on Enbarr. 

“Hubert will be there,” he says. Raps his knuckles on the parchment for emphasis, over the lines of the wide avenue before the palace, the great arch there. 

“What makes you say that?” Byleth’s expression doesn’t shift from its usual blank slate. Only their eyes move, from Dedue’s hand to his face. Assessing, without judgement. “Were the positions reversed, I would expect to find you at Dimitri’s side.”

“You would be correct.” 

He pauses. Tries to find the right words to explain. 

_We had an understanding_, he wants to say. For all that it is true, it does not seem to be enough. Plates of food that would keep left on the kitchen counter at night, the kettle still running hot whenever he came down, the stock of candles always full. Their shoulders perhaps once, in that entire year, brushing, as they navigated the dormitory stairs.   
  
Dimitri was always withdrawn after his bad dreams, the howling rage only barely held back; it grounded him to have someone there. And though Dedue once or twice allowed himself to wonder what it was that chased Edelgard through those nights, it never occurred to him to ask. In the hallway between rooms, by candlelight, the two of them sleep-heavy and slow: Hubert met his eyes, and Dedue nodded back.

“His Highness will not allow me to lighten his burden,” he attempts, “and so I stay at his side, to steady him should he stumble. But Hubert would rather clear the path.”

Byleth watches him, steady and unblinking, as though waiting for elaboration. Dedue has nothing more to offer. Some emotion flickers across their face then just as swiftly disappears, and then they nod. 

“I will take this under advisement,” they say. “Thank you.”

They bend back to the map, reaching for the pile of scout reports to the side. Dimitri, Gilbert and Seteth will look over their plans later, and help to finalize. Dedue does not envy them this task. 

He takes his leave. Finds his now-familiar spot in the greenhouse, to sit down cross-legged in the heat and the light. The cats squint their eyes in pleasure at his presence, at the way he strokes along their spines. There is a diffuse, formless sorrow inside of his chest even the hum of their purring cannot dispel.

The past, he thinks. The past, which will not be changed or taken back.

  
*

  
“You were right,” Byleth says, later. Dedue grunts. Paces a little faster. Above, in the distance: Ingrid and Cyril, their squads, weaving complex patterns at speeds breakneck, volleys of Ragnaroks and Sagittaes blazing in blinding streaks past them. 

Now and then, more often than anyone is comfortable with, the dark roil of a Banshee precedes them. As they watch, one of the wyverns is swallowed up. Black sloughs off armor and the membranes of wings like acid. 

The wyvern screams as it struggles to keep aloft, the sound of it piercing through the distance and briefly covering the shuffle of troops, the clatter of armor. It staggers as it fails to evade a new volley of spellfire, and then tumbles, taking its rider with it. Dedue has seen before how the formations will shift to allow the rear units to catch a falling comrade. Not today. Smoke lingers in the wake of its fall. 

Behind them a clatter of hooves. Byleth slows, hand on their sword, and Dedue is already halfway to cover their back, but it’s only a squire, soot-streaked, blood snaking down her hand from somewhere under her mail. She can’t be a day over sixteen, but her voice is steady as she delivers her message — _heavy resistance met in the west, His Highness delayed. Resuming advance by the time you receive these news_. 

Dedue’s gathered up their men by the time Byleth is done interrogating the girl on what else she’s seen on the way and sent her off to the medics. They’re not so far now from the palace. Resistance along the fortifications has grown fiercer, more desperate, and they’ve lost several squadrons now to traps and Beasts set loose in the streets. He left his axe in one of them; there’s an ache in his hand, from driving his fist through its beaded stone mask. The crack of its spine had been incredibly loud. He’d broken it again, after, just to be sure.

A Fire goes up from Byleth’s outstretched arm, pointed straight at the sky. After a few seconds, another flies up in response from the west, on the other side of the river. It has Sylvain’s signature to it, a little extra heat to make it flare, and Dedue feels a small measure of tension fall from his shoulders.

They push forward. The city is nearly theirs now, but there, in view of the palace, the last remnants of the Empire’s soldiers are making their stand.

Halfway through their advance Byleth sends another signal up. Dedue has to tackle them out of the way of sniper fire, and in turn they slap a hasty Heal on the burn that’s made a pulsing knot of pain of his shoulder while they hunker down to wait out the sudden deluge of artillery and ballistics. Not long. The aerial forces are wheeling back in, the sun lower now and at their backs. For a moment they are beautiful, the evening light outlining the sleek pegasi, setting the thinner parts of the wyverns’ wings aglow and tipping their riders’ spears in Adrestian red and gold. 

Then — a crackle, a flicker. They scatter as sparrows before the hawk, and, denied of their prey, the black tendrils of Hubert’s Mire fold back onto themselves. The danger passed, the formations come again together, and fall down on the Empire’s backline.

Byleth moves forward. Dedue follows. On the other side of the city, Dimitri and the heirs Gautier and Fraldarius must do the same. The air thickens with smoke, the shadows of arrows. Dedue climbs over the rubble of fallen homes, steps on corpses in blue and red liveries alike, and remembers how the map had looked on the war table: the broad, clean lines of it, how easy it had been to point and say _here, there, this is the place we need to take_.

War is never so pretty, on the field. Smoke stains the evening a darker red, and what lines there are are jagged and torn, bloodstained. 

Blood in his mouth, on his knuckles underneath his gloves. He has wondered, of late, if the battle-madness has not taken him at last — if they are so close now to the root of things, to the hands that sowed the Tragedy of his people, that he is become also a vessel for their ghosts. 

They are welcome, if it is so. He the shield, he the sword — what else is he for?

He has sworn: that he will survive this war. That he will see Duscur again in bloom. Wraps these two things at the center of his heart, and lets the cool haze of combat wash over him as they engage with Enbarr’s last line of defense. 

  
*

  
Byleth is the one who ends it. The Empire’s line has long since broken, the pegasi and wyverns scattered to clear the last of the ramparts and hunt down stragglers. Corpses pile heavy as they near the bridge, more blue than red, and many mangled beyond comprehension. 

It’s where they find Hubert, somehow still alive, his coat stiff with blood: propped against the parapet, his face turned towards the palace which waits beyond the river. Despite the carnage all around there is a wistfulness about him. It is in the curve of his neck, the set of his shoulders, the leaning towards.

It disappears as the sound of their approach registers above the rest of the noise, the groaning of the dead, the distant clinging of arms. His breath whistles through the jagged tear of his throat and his lips twist, bloodstained and humorless, when he recognizes them.

Dedue lets his shadow fall over the man. For a moment they look at one another, and then Hubert turns his gaze to the palace again. Closes his eyes, a rattle shaking his chest. 

Dedue remembers: stepping away from his lord. How for days, months, years his throat was a hard knot, how the only lifeline in the darkest days had been the knowledge, the certainty that he must be safe, that somewhere out there he must still be alive.

All that Hubert has done he despises. But the understanding remains, bitter.

A whisper. The Sword of the Creator flashes past Dedue before the Death Γ can fully take shape; Hubert coughs and chokes, slumps to his knees, wheezes until he can no longer.

“He chose her,” Dedue tells Byleth later. Their mouth is pressed thin. “He knew what could happen, and made that choice, again and again.”

“I know,” they say, but there is still an unhappiness to them. It is often like this, whenever they face others who were once students. Dedue wonders if it is sentiment, or only wounded pride that they cannot convince everyone to their side.

Dimitri joins them an hour later. His hair is matted, but his mouth is drawn grim rather than grinning. When he sees Dedue he makes a sound at the back of his throat, like he isn’t sure how to ask but he can tell something is wrong. Lays a hand at Dedue’s elbow, and though there are layers of metal and leather between their skin, despite the war not yet over, there is a warmth there. 

_I could leave_, Dedue thinks, and the truth of it is like a river cleaving through the mountains. _I could leave and never see you again._

  
*

  
One night when he was fifteen — when the loss inside of him was something huge and inescapable, a chain of peaks blotting out even the sky — Dimitri had taken him by the wrist and dragged him to hide in the castle’s armory. They had still been strangers then, bruised in the places where they clung onto one another and held on too hard.

Of that night he remembers only fragments. It had been dark, and Dimitri’s hand warm. The points of spears had seemed the fangs of some great beast curled around them, the scent of metal and oil a reminder of days spent underfoot in his father’s smithy. In the enormity of his grief this had been a comfort rather than a hurt.

It was hours before they were found, and then there were admonishments, yelling even. In the face of his uncle’s ire, Dimitri mulish and unrepentant. 

What had they spoken about? Years later he does not recall. The language had been too new in his mouth, Duscur’s ashes not yet swallowed and thick on his tongue.

Only Dimitri saying: I want you to do this. The knife in Dedue’s hand. And Dedue watching from outside his own body as he set to work, delicate, the way he had done more than once for his sister. In the candlelight blond could almost pass for silver, and though he’d never cut this short before, though his sister had never trembled like this under his hand, it had been oddly easy to fall back into it. 

Dimitri had shaken his head, after it was done, run his hand through the shorter strands at the back. Blinked through tears, turning to face Dedue, and smiled. Prince, almost-king, bits of hair dusted on his shoulders and at their feet, reedy and small in the shadow of his father’s funerary armor. 

He is not so small any longer. His hair again to his shoulders, Fódlan’s crown heavy and gleaming on his brow. Dedue can tell from the cast of his mouth that he hates it, and that he nevertheless will bear it for as long as he must. Dimitri has always been thus.

“Thank you,” he says now to Dedue, after the treaties have been signed, the borders redrawn. Duscur given her own name again. They stand on a balcony, removed enough from prying ears and eyes, but the view overlooks the main courtyard where the horses are already being prepared. “For everything. I know words carry little weight against all that you have done for me, but —” his voice falters here, when it held strong as new-forged steel for his coronation, his speeches to the fallen Empire and the scattered Alliance, for Byleth’s anointing.

For a moment he teeters on the verge of indecision, and then he turns, to put his crown down to the side. He looks distraught, and Dedue takes a step forward, only for Dimitri to throw his arms around him, to pull him close, his breath shaky and warm on the side of Dedue’s throat.

“Forgive me this selfishness,” Dimitri whispers, and he sounds like the boy he was when they first met. “I will miss you.”

Carefully, Dedue raises his arms. Sets them one on Dimitri’s back, the other at the base of his neck. Keeps him there, solid and warm and alive, weeping. 

Remembers that night when they were hiding. How Dimitri’s pulse had beat under Dedue’s fingers when he’d tipped his head back soft and trusting under the knife, like a drum he could follow back to himself. In the dark and quiet: Dedue’s heart for the first time daring to hope for something beyond the mountains.

_It was always my choice to follow_, he thinks to says when Dimitri finally lets go, but for his myriad qualities Dimitri belongs to Faerghus above all. He would not understand.

“We both have ghosts to set to rest,” Dedue says instead, and presses his lips to Dimitri’s brow. “But I will come back when the work is done, as many times as I have to.” 

Says, as he meant before, as he finds he means now: “I will come back for you.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am on twitter @ jackaljag if anyone wants to cry about Dedue. Thank you for reading!


End file.
